


Approval

by Sakiku



Series: An Exercise in Control [5]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Puppets, Showing Off, Sparring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-09
Updated: 2013-08-09
Packaged: 2017-12-22 22:21:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/918707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sakiku/pseuds/Sakiku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chiyo, Suna's premier puppet mistress once upon a time, examines Kankurou's progress.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Approval

Fandom: Naruto

Characters: Chiyo, Kankuro, Gaara

Words: ~2300

Rating: PG-13

Summary: Kankuro shows off for Chiyo.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. It belongs to Kishimoto and whatever big corporations he has sold the rights to, so it should be obvious that I can't make any money from it.

Exercise in Control - Chiyo

Chiyo had watched Kankuro practice before – and while his more... private practices were a bit messy, they were by no means unusual. But today was for her alone. She stood on the wall of Sunagakure, shored up to an ever-more impressing height by their Kazekage.

Four years ago, she never would have suspected the Jinchuuriki being capable of using his powers creatively like that. Four years ago, she never would have suspected that she would sacrifice herself for said Jinchuuriki, let alone that she would survive said sacrifice.

Despite the looming war on the horizon, a war bigger than any the Elemental Countries had ever faced before, she wasn't disappointed that she had survived.

Four years ago, she hadn't thought much of _any_ of the Yondaime Kazekage's children. But they had surprised her, kept surprising her. Gaara with his mastery over sand even without the one-tail. Temari and her winds. Kankuro most of all.

She had given him her grandson's old puppets Karasu and Black Ant only because the Yondaime had... suggested... after Sasori's defection and subsequent murder of the Sandaime, that it would be in her best interest to show her continued support of Sunagakure. At that time, Kankuro had been barely five years old.

The Yondaime had probably expected she'd give the puppets to experienced puppeteers, but she had been incensed enough to put them into untrained hands and thus make them useless for a long time.

But the boy had grown into them, slowly mastering their use. Like any good puppeteer, he had customized and advanced the puppets. Like any _good_ puppeteer – but not an excellent one. He had been good at making puppets and techniques his, but he had lacked the inventiveness, that spark of creation that had made her grandson so formidable. He had been _content_ with his battle puppets, scorning some of the most basic puppetry lessons. 'Always hide yourself'. 'Deception and subterfuge always trumps a frontal assault'. 'Genjutsu over ninjutsu'.

He did use _some_ of them, but not in a very puppetry-like way.

Reconstructing and practicing the fine details with Sasori's body-shell had been the first time Kankuro had shown the true makings of a puppeteer. And so, Chiyo had finally stepped down and given him the last two puppets that made Sasori's legacy complete: facsimiles of her own children. Sasori had called them Mother and Father, and her heart had nearly broken when he had showed them to her the first time. The loss of her son and his wife had still been too fresh in her mind, and precious little Sasori had managed to capture their likeness well enough that, for a second, she had thought they had come back.

Just like with all other puppets her grandson had left behind, she hadn't been able to make herself destroy them.

And now they were in the hands of the Yondaime's son, the Godaime's brother, and there was another moment when she thought her son and her daughter-in-law had come back to life.

They calmly strolled into the training ground, smaller Sasori between his taller parents, and it was so perfect that she thought the past had come alive. There was not a iota of chakra in use for a henge; both the looks and the naturalness of their motions were unenhanced by illusion. What she hadn't expected though was to feel chakra – an entire chakra network – coming from the puppets. Her hand surreptitiously clenched inside the wide folds of her sleeve. A small needle laced with fire-ant poison, one of the most potent irritants she knew, dug itself into her skin, and the pain was big enough to dispell any other non-henge genjutsu. But no, all three puppets still felt alive in a way she had only thought Sasori's body capable of.

Chiyo couldn't tear her eyes away from the perfect little family as they walked into the center of the training ground, Father putting a hand on Sasori's shoulder, Mother bending down to give his forehead a brief kiss. Then they moved to stand aside, leaving their son in the middle.

Sasori slowly lowered itself into a ready stance, the illusion of humanity not yet broken. The come-hither motion it employed towards the other two puppets was a nice touch. For a moment, everything was still. And then, Mother and Father exploded into motion, flanking Sasori from both sides.

Father closed in further, while Mother kept circling at a distance and used a rapid-fire senbon launcher from its palm. None of the projectiles came close to touching Sasori as it ducked and weaved and used its cloak to wipe whole swathes of needles out of the air. Discarding the fabric, Sasori splayed its propeller-blades and started rotating them, quicker and quicker until the individual blades became an indistinct, blurry surface.

Chiyo could hear the susurrating sound of displaced air from where she stood on the wall. With a raised eyebrow, she watched as Father briefly clapped its hands together, and then whipped them outwards without ever coming close to touching Sasori. Nonetheless, the other puppet jumped back as far as it could. It was a bit surprising to see that Sasori's toes didn't make the jump together with it, neatly severed just behind the ball of its foot. Only on second glance did Chiyo realize that the air between Father's fingers glittered suspiciously. 

The wires she had installed. 

Apparently, Kankuro had kept the weapon, but he must have done something to augment its cutting power. Under Chiyo's control, the wires had mainly been a tool for restraining. The way Kankuro used them, they were an exceedingly dangerous weapon for offense. Was a coating of diamond dust enough to generate the enormous cutting power, or had Kankuro somehow managed to combine it with some wind chakra?

Sasori retaliated by spitting a glob of flame at Father, all the while deflecting Mother's weaponry. In between the rapid-fire senbon that still hadn't run out, Mother was shooting kunai and shuriken, the former apparently guided either by nearly invisible wires or chakra threads. At first, the kunais' flight path was straight and narrow like any thrown weapon. But just before they came into reach of Sasori's propeller-blade defense, they veered off to strike from unexpected angles. 

Sasori's defense, for those it couldn't deflect, was not being there to hit. In a show of flexibility that would have meant dislocated limbs in a human, Sasori bent and curved and ducked and jumped, redirecting the weapons towards Father whenever it could. 

It was a beautiful ballet, conducted by a masterful puppeteer, Chiyo had to acknowledge. The only fault she could see was that Kankuro had done nothing to hide himself – he was standing against the wall of Sunagakure, several dozen meters beneath Chiyo's vantage point on top. A brief glance at him showed boredom, but the pain in her finger where she had pricked herself made that impression waver like a fata morgana. Sometimes she thought she could see his hands flicking and tugging, and he was staring at the battle with a concentration worthy of a master conductor. 

But he was still in plain sight, directing the performance where everyone could see him. 

Chiyo had to wonder how he dealt with that in battle.

But the ballet went on. Sasori's flamethrower seemed to keep Father's wire threat in check quite well. Chiyo assumed that Kankuro didn't want to risk damaging this weapon – the heat just couldn't be good for the incredibly thin wires. 

And indeed, with a last slash Father reached to the back of its neck and drew a sword. A katana. It had apparently rested along Father's spine – or it had _been_ Father's spine. Chiyo frowned. The sword-enforced rigidity might be a liability to exploit. However, it was equally clear that without the sword, Father was just as flexible as any human, if not more so.

With the two now in such close contact, Mother stopped her indiscriminate weapons use. Maybe her storage seals had run out, too. Kankuro must have improved them quite a bit to keep up sustained fire for such a long time. She had expected Mother to run out more than half a minute ago.

In close combat, Sasori and Father were equally impressive. The propeller-blades could strike out at angles impossible for even the best swordsmen, and so were very hard to predict and block. Father, on the other hand, stuck to more traditional samurai techniques. Simple but effective thrusts, solid defense, but nothing special. It was obvious that Kankurou, despite his puppetry skills, was not a swordsman.

It didn't matter. Mother made up for the slack by being a long-range threat, shooting a single kunai or senbon to help herd Sasori into Father's attacks. 

And then Sasori formed hand-seals and exchanged places with Mother in a perfectly executed Kawarimi. 

Chiyo exhaled slowly, the only sign she allowed to show of her surprise. Exchanging places with a puppet was nothing unusual. Two puppets swapping with each other was slightly less common, but still nothing out of this world. But when the chakra for the technique originated with one of the puppets instead of the puppeteer... If she wasn't a hundred percent certain that the Kankuro standing at the base of Sunagakure's wall was the real one, the feat would have been a lot less impressive. 

Sasori didn't waste time with the sudden distance it had gained. It crouched down and then jumped, high enough that it was nearly level with Chiyo on the wall. And then, the puppet's illusion of humanity dropped away in a whirl of limbs. Gaping holes opened themselves in its hands, a diameter as big as the wrist could support. Its head detached itself like someone had slit its throat, tethered to the falling puppet only by the marginal support of its spine. 

Sasori angled itself, pointing hands and neck stump at the parental duo on the ground, its head flapping behind in the wind.

Chiyo just barely had the time to see the second, non-flamethrower tube in Sasori's throat, before all hell broke loose. Blades rained down on the puppets on the ground – the kawarimi had made Mother take Sasori's place in close-combat with Father, gathering both of them in one place – and then explosions shook the ground. Mother and Father were consumed in an inferno of spraying sand and shock waves and smoke and bangs loud enough to burst ear drums.

It continued on and on, for nearly half a minute, and if Kankuro's sealing work with Mother's weapons launchers had been impressive, this technique was even more so. To seal weapons that in themselves were tagged with explosive seals again, was very tricky. To seal them in a way that the explosive seals were primed upon the weapon being unsealed, was ingenious. To combine them with the launcher's impulse and mass-storage...

When the continuous detonations finally abated, Chiyo felt more than a little deaf.

Everything was quiet, letting the dust settle. In battle, that would be the perfect chance to strike with a tiny poisoned senbon, undetectable after the grand explosions from before. In a performance though, it was bad practice to continue when the audience couldn't see what was happening on stage.

The dissipating smoke revealed first the buzzing light of a continuous chakra technique. Then, as the air cleared more, the circular outline of a chakra shield appeared. 

So Kankuro hadn't gotten rid of that, either. 

Chiyo concentrated on how he had improved the shields she had first come up with, distracting herself from the level of emotions welling up in her. Mother and Father had somehow combined their forces to support one huge chakra shield, mainly pointed in Sasori's direction, but curving at the edges to create a half-dome. Their unprotected side was charred and dusty, but they looked still functional. Most of the damage seemed cosmetic, and Chiyo wondered whether that could be attributed to the strength of their shield, or to the weakness of the attack. Had he softened it for a safe demonstration?

If Kankuro was able to increase the blasting power of his explosions, Sasori's inferno attack might become something even bijuu would fear.

And then, the Mother puppet released the shield and did the _same_ , formed seals and switched once again with Sasori. No matter how much Chiyo concentrated, the chakra definitely came from the puppet. 

So she hadn't misread the move earlier.

Behind the shock, she wondered how that feat might have been accomplished. It certainly hadn't been anything Kankuro had recovered from Mother or Father. Had Sasori's wooden body contained the key to this novel technique? There _had_ to have been an artificial chakra circulatory system inside the puppet; otherwise Sasori's heart and whatever he had done to preserve his brain functions, would have died of chakra starvation. 

Kankuro had to have first made the technique work for him, and then reverse-engineer it from Sasori's puppet body. Not a small feat at all, especially because Kankuro's heart and brain weren't within the body. If he could expand on that, give puppets the same capability for jutsus as ninja had without the need for self-mutilation...

Sometimes, Chiyo thought that Sasori had taken her advice too literally. Hiding within a puppet brought greater protection than standing aside and directing the battle form behind. However, she had never intended her words to mean that Sasori _become_ a puppet. Maybe it was good that Kankuro had chosen the opposite way, of directing things in plain sight.

“He has become good,” a voice interrupted her musings.

Chiyo didn't need to turn her head, because the Kazekage's chakra was unmistakable even with the one-tail removed. She looked at the short form nonetheless because politeness dictated she acknowledge him. “He still has potential for growth,” she said.

“Of course.”

Together, they kept watching the display below.

In the end, Chiyo couldn't bring herself to give Kankuro more than a nod. Ingenious as he was in his own right, he wasn't hers. Not her son, not her daughter-in-law, not her grandson. Not even the product of her teachings, seeing that she had had no hand in his education beyond giving him old puppets.

Maybe he would become one of the Great Names of Puppetry despite that.

**Author's Note:**

> 'jebm' over on livejournal asked me if I could do something with Mother, Father, and Sasori's Akahigi sankaku. It took just about forever to write, until I gave up on it a year ago. While posting the rest of the 'Exercise in Control' series on AO3, I remembered that I still had this snippet on my hard drive, and I was surprised that it didn't take much anymore to make it postable. 
> 
> So, this is the end of the series. I hope you liked it :)


End file.
